Underneath Everything

by Marcy Beller Paul

“If you look hard enough, you can almost see their pointed ears,” Jolene says. The sound reverberates through her cheeks; I can feel the words before they come out of her mouth. “And their noses, red. All of them, little elves, always working. So busy.” She sighs. I inhale her scented breath.

  Then we turn to the center, toward the trendy kids. They’re in the first row, decorated with glitter and mousse and makeup. Even the boys. They aren’t onstage, but they’ve got costumes and characters.

  One of Jolene’s long, dark hairs falls across my cheek and catches on my lip. I don’t move it.

  “And there,” she says, the skin around her mouth lifting and tightening again, “see their wings and sparkling skin? The way they fly above everything? How they hide? Fairies. Obviously.”

  I laugh. Our lips lift together, touching at the corners.

  “And them?” I ask, pushing my cheek against Jolene’s until we’re all the way to the right, facing the girls who clamored to sit with her when Kris and I stopped.

  “Trolls, of course,” she says, peeling herself away from me. I want to pull her back. Instead, I hide my hands inside the pockets of my half-zipped hoodie and run my thumb along the lighter.

  “What does that make us?” I ask. I wait for her to dress me in gowns, crown me like she used to.

  “It makes us Us,” she says as the heel of her faded, brown cowboy boot descends next to me. Jolene slides her skinny jeans, narrow hips, and loose, turquoise sweater into the seat. We’re sitting side by side for everyone to see.

  My fingers grip the Zippo. It’s hot and slick. My eyes dart across the auditorium.

  Jolene keeps her face toward the stage as she slips her hand into my pocket, twines her fingers through mine, and locks the lighter between our palms. “Don’t worry about them,” she says. Then her hand is gone, and so is the lighter. Jolene holds it up, twirls it around. “They’re not real.”

  “Funny,” I say. But it’s true. No heads turn. No eyes bore into us. Nobody’s even noticed. It’s like we’re not here. Like Jolene knew—the night she called me to her house and I walked dark streets to get to her—that we’d end up in these seats, having this conversation. It’s like she’s always known: Maybe we’re both not here.

  “I remember it being the other way around,” I say. “Us, not them.”

  I rest my arm on the worn bar of wood between us. Jolene does the same thing. Our forearms touch, our middle fingers link.

  Hudson wasn’t at lunch. Kris left me in the car. Jolene is here. She’s real to me.

  “Maybe there is no way around.” She flicks open the Zippo with her free hand and hits the flint with a square, dark-blue nail. The bitter, burned smell reminds me of the bonfire. The party. The way I found her behind Bella’s house. Passed out.

  Jolene and I have talked about a lot of things in this auditorium, but she’s never mentioned that night. How out of control she was. I’d never seen her that far gone before. Even when her mom would call for the third night in a row to say she couldn’t make it home. Even when her dad walked in the door and went straight to his study, flat out ignoring her.

  “Are you okay?” I let go of her finger and clasp her whole hand.

  “Didn’t know you kept this.” She flicks the Zippo again. The metal top clicks closed, killing the flame.

  “You gave it to me,” I say.

  “I did.” Jolene pockets it. “It was my favorite.”

  “Jolene.”

  “What do you care anyway?” Her tone is flip, but her mouth is tight and her breath is quick. “You didn’t seem to give a shit when you dropped me last year.”

  Her words are a punch: You dropped me.

  Doesn’t she get it? I walked away because she forced me. Because she gave me an ultimatum. On that cement path, in the sickening heat, Jolene had asked me to leave the one person who had never left me. And just like Kris said in the car this morning, I made a choice.

  So yeah, I walked away from Jolene that day. But I didn’t drop her. I knew we’d find our way back to each other eventually, like the shrimp to the goby fish. We always did. She’d call or text or show up at my house.

  I just didn’t know she’d show up with him.

  “You didn’t need me. You had Hudson.” I pull back on my hand, but Jolene holds on hard. I swallow back the shame of that day, of finding them together after I’d been hoping that he and I could—

  “I did,” she says, and smiles, but it’s not pretty. I see it in profile. The pain—plain, ugly—seems out of place on her face. “Seemed like a fair trade at the time. You for him. I had such high hopes, after everything you told me.” Jolene juts her chin. Her eyes rise above the stage, to the scaffolding and lights, but she’s not looking at them. She’s not looking at anything. “He used to trace letters on my back and make me guess what they said. I was always cold. That open window.” Hudson’s window. That’s why it always seemed so familiar. It’s one of the pictures Jolene texted me. “One night, after we trashed his dad’s office, he spelled ‘I love you.’ It was the first time he said it. To my back, not my face.”

  She swallows slowly. The taut muscles of her throat bow and constrict.

  Then it’s like something clicks, and she’s with me again. “Anyway, it didn’t matter in the end, did it? He ditched me, too. Gave up on me as soon as his mom called. He said he hated her. He said he’d stay. But he left as soon as things got better. Didn’t give a shit that nothing changed for me.”

  “Jolene.”

  In front of us the curtain closes, but it doesn’t block everything. In the slim strip of space between the thick velvet and the scuffed wood floor, shoes and shadows scurry away from center stage.

  “At least his mom said she was sorry,” Jolene says. “You know what my mom told me the last time I asked her to tell me a story?”

  I shake my head.

  “She told me to make one up myself,” Jolene says. “I was six.”

  Now I’m the one clutching her hand, holding us together. “Maybe he didn’t know,” I offer.

  “He knew. He just wasn’t you.” She turns to me, her wide lips and wet eyes lit from the side.

  The curtain opens. The cast lines up across a stark stage. Soft notes echo from the piano. Even though it’s only rehearsal and we’re no kind of audience, the whole place shushes.

  “You had Bella,” I whisper.

  Jolene lets out a quick laugh, leans her head back, and lifts her eyes to the ceiling. “Bella’s fun. But she doesn’t have this.” She loosens her grip, then skims her finger along the scar on my palm. “She’s not best-friend material. Not like you and Kris.”

  “We’re not best friends,” I say. It’s a reflex. That’s just a label. It doesn’t mean anything. “Never were.”

  “No?” Jolene cocks her head. A boy’s voice floats across the auditorium.

  “It’s not like that with us.” I can’t explain Kris to Jolene. Just like I could never explain Jolene to Kris.

  The entire cast begins to sing behind the boy. They’re facing us—mouths open. I want to sing back at them. To let something out of me. It’s too hard to hold Kris and Jolene in at the same time.

  “I mean,” Jolene says with a measured breath, “I was kind of surprised, after that whole thing with the ropes.”

  My lips stick at the mention of that afternoon. I pry them apart. “What do you mean? Kris was the only person who spoke to me.”

  “Oh,” Jolene says, her voice low, her eyes down, her hand tight in mine again. “I thought you knew. I just assumed. You two— She never told you?”

  The whole cast sings together now, including the boy. It doesn’t sound pretty, like something practiced. There are no harmonies or separate voices. It’s just one note, one voice, one full-throated sound, pleading with me.

  “Told me what?” I ask. Kris is sleepovers and secrets, mind reading and fortune-telling. There’s no way Jolene knows something about her that I don’t. There’s no way she had anything to do with the ropes. Hea
t rolls out from the center of my body to my fingertips. It’s like when the stage light landed on me. So hot and bright, and suddenly I couldn’t see, could barely breathe.

  “Nothing,” Jolene says, dropping my hand. “You should ask her.” She glances toward the stage, stands, then spins on the worn heel of her cowboy boot.

  She’s leaving.

  The song ends. The bell rings. The lights come up in the auditorium.

  “Jolene,” I call. Heads turn in our direction, but right now I don’t care if they see us together. I have to know. I skip sideways down the row, thighs hitting each collapsed seat as I go.

  Jolene stops in the center of the aisle and looks up, as if it just started raining and she’s the first to feel the drops.

  “Careful,” she says, with a sideways glance to the rest of the class.

  “This way.” I grab Jolene’s hand and pull her up the aisle, toward the back doors, leaving murmurs and open mouths behind us.

  She falls into step behind me, so close it’s not just our hands but our entire arms and half our bodies touching. That’s how we are when I push through the door into what’s usually an empty vestibule.

  That’s how we are when I see her, when she sees me.

  “Kris,” I say. The stack of student papers in her arms falls to the floor.

  “You’re fucking kidding me.” She looks from me to Jolene and back again. “Her?”

  At first I don’t speak. Then I remember. There’s no tape stuck to my lips. I can breathe and I can ask and Kris can tell me she had nothing to do with it.

  “Ask her,” a soft voice says, but it’s not the one in my head.

  That’s when I notice strands of dark hair and hot breath on my neck.

  “Ask me what?” Kris says with tight, thin lips. She looks at me, even though Jolene’s the one who spoke.

  “Hi, Kris,” Jolene says.

  “Screw you, Jolene.” Kris doesn’t break our gaze.

  “Bye, Kris,” Jolene says, like they hang out every day. And to me: “Lorraine.” She raises my hand, squeezes it, pulls me close. “Ask her,” she says again, soft enough to tickle my ear, loud enough so Kris can hear.

  Then she leaves.

  I turn back to Kris. Scattered holiday issues spread out around her feet like roots. It’s like she’s grown out of the paper, like she’s made of it. That’s how fragile the last year suddenly feels. Like something I could crumple in my hand.

  I was kind of surprised, after that whole thing with the ropes. She never told you?

  Kris is waiting for me to say something. But Jolene’s words burn my throat, cover my lips, loop around my wrists. If Kris had anything to do with that afternoon . . .

  Ask her.

  “I should have known.” Kris shakes her head. “Hudson. Those clothes. I’m so fucking stupid. But, god, Mattie. Jolene? Really? She’s using you.”

  My hand—the one Jolene just released—closes into a fist. “It’s not like that.”

  Kris laughs—a short, high sound of disbelief. “Really? What’s it like? No, wait. Let me guess. She told you things about me. Hudson, too. Please, tell me you don’t believe her.”

  I dig my nails into my palm so hard I know I’ll see marks.

  Ask her.

  Kris shuts her eyes, takes a long, deep breath. “Mattie.” My name comes from her throat like a groan.

  “She needs me.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “She tells me I’m pretty.” It sounds so stupid and grade school, but it’s true. When’s the last time Kris complimented me? Told me I was too good for someone? “She thinks I can be something better—”

  “Better than yourself?” Kris asks, incredulous.

  I stare at Kris without blinking, even though I can feel a tear form and fill my lower eyelid. Doesn’t she get it?

  “Jolene’s not going anywhere,” I say.

  “Not while she still needs you for whatever it is she’s planning to do.”

  “All you’ve ever wanted to do is leave.” The words come out loud. Louder than I thought they would. But when Kris answers, she’s even louder. She’s shouting.

  “This town, not you!” Kris crushes copies of the paper under her sneakers as she steps toward me. “Can’t you see? She’s doing it again. Remember the manhunt game? The ropes?” Kris knows what I do when she mentions that afternoon. What I did before Jolene said:

  Ask her.

  “Jolene did mention something, actually. About that afternoon with the ropes.”

  Kris freezes. Her skin pales next to her red curls. “Bitch,” she whispers under her breath.

  “I didn’t believe her.”

  “You don’t understand,” Kris says, “you don’t know what happened.”

  “Obviously.”

  “No, I mean—” Kris’s chest goes red. I’ve seen it happen one other time—when we left the shed. But right now it’s all I can focus on. Her skin blooming. Because if she had something to do with that afternoon and she didn’t tell me—after a whole year of isolating ourselves, after all the hours I’ve spent alone, wondering what I could have done differently, after everything I’ve given up since that moment I got her out of the shed—then I want to hurt her. I want to cover her in that color, a full-body bruise.

  “Look.” Kris touches her fingers to her chest. When she takes them away, she lowers her shoulders and raises her chin high, resigned. “I knew Jolene before she moved here, okay?”

  I shake my head. I thought Kris said—

  “Remember that time after fifth grade when we moved across town and my parents sent me to camp for the summer to get me out of the way? That’s how we met,” she says, faster now, like she wants to get it all out in one breath. “She seemed cool enough, at first. She had a stash of candy and random comics she’d let me borrow after lights-out. Then halfway through the summer she decided to pick on this skinny, homesick girl with straight bangs named Melissa. By that time we were best friends, or at least that’s what she called us to everyone else. You know I hate that phrase. I mean, I didn’t like it before, but after that I couldn’t stand it.”

  Kris pauses. She’s waiting for me to say something, I guess. But I don’t. Because she knew Jolene. She knew her.

  When it’s obvious I’m not going to say anything, she picks up the story again.

  “Anyway, so one night Jolene comes up with this plan. I’m supposed to slip a bunch of laxatives into Melissa’s drink at dinner so we can watch her shit her pants during evening activity. Only I don’t do it. So Jolene comes for me in the middle of the night—wakes me up, leads me to the bathrooms at the back of the bunk, and hands me a cup. ‘I thought you’d like some water,’ she says. But the liquid in the cup isn’t clear. It’s cloudy. And I know what’s in it. But I take it from her and chug it anyway, because screw her, you know?”

  Kris stops to catch her breath. It’s not just her chest that’s red anymore. The rash has crept up her neck to her chin and across her cheeks. Just like the heat inside me. Kris and Jolene shared a bunk and a bed and a summer. They shared all those things, and Kris never told me. Neither of them did. I feel left out again. Like I’m in the backseat of Kris’s car watching Jim’s hand creep up Kris’s leg before she slaps it away. Jolene didn’t just get Hudson first. She also got Kris.

  I feel sick.

  “That doesn’t explain anything,” I say, which isn’t exactly true. It explains some things—why Kris and Jolene always seemed like opposing forces—but it doesn’t explain everything.

  The tendons in Kris’s neck tense before she speaks again. “When Jolene moved here, we were good friends, you and me, remember? I mean, not like the last year, but good. Solid.”

  I swallow, nod. Nothing feels solid. Not the ground beneath my feet. Or the last fifteen months. Not Kris, or me. Everything feels slippery.

  “I warned her not to screw with you,” Kris says.

  “I didn’t need your protection.” My voice feels far away again, like my ears are und
erwater but my mouth is out, and the sounds I make can’t reach me, not completely.

  “But you had it.” Kris says, her breath fast, her stare sharp. “When I told her to stay away from you—”

  “You had no right—”

  “When I told her,” Kris says again, sounding out each syllable, “she said it was you calling and texting her all the time. She told me you’d do anything for her.”

  Something inside me loses its white-knuckled grip and slips.

  It’s one thing to know you’d do anything for someone. It’s a secret, dark thing that’s hard to admit, because most of the time you don’t think about it. You just do the things you need to do. You run with them over rocky cliffs, go to their house at midnight, stroke their hair, and hold them close. You carry them away from drunk boys on your shoulder. You take them home. But you don’t say it out loud, and neither does she. Because it makes you feel weak. Because you don’t know what it means.

  My skin tingles, and my head hammers at the thought of them talking about me like that, taking the deepest parts of me and airing them out. Of Jolene saying it out loud. But I still need to know how the conversation ended. “And you said?”

  “I told her it was bullshit,” Kris says, “that if she went too far, you’d see her for who she really is, just like I did.”

  “I’m not you.” This one thought keeps my head above the water. I’m not her. Whatever she had with Jolene doesn’t matter. It’s different with me.

  Kris looks at the crushed paper at her feet—the issue I know she’s been killing herself to finish for the past three weeks—and smiles. But it doesn’t look like a smile. It looks more like our school mascot, the blue devil baring its teeth under her sneakers. “That’s what she said.” Kris drops the smile, lifts her head. “But I told her it didn’t matter. That there were just some things you wouldn’t do. ‘Name it,’ Jolene said to me. ‘Tell me.’”

  “You came up with the ropes?”

  “Only because in a million years I never thought you’d actually go through with it!”

  “But it was your idea.”

  “Yeah. Fine. It was my idea. But I didn’t do it. Jolene did. And you let her.”